IV - The Controversial Sixties

Objectively speaking, the sixties were decisive years for contemporary Portuguese poetry. Both in Lisbon and in the province, interesting initiatives appeared — some of them to last.

The first significant move came from Poesia 61, a group of five poets who wanted to break away from the dominant praxis and verbose conformism, away from the jaded messianic clichés of social incantation. Those five poets, (Gastão Cruz, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, Maria Teresa Horta, Luiza Neto Jorge and Casimiro de Brito) adopted an intense and condensed coded language, a controlled textual economy, and reiterated social preoccupations, to re-launch coded messages in the circuits of communications, that the censors could not instantly identify, and made significant innovations in their focus on the hottest problems affecting Portuguese society. In the end, they were all to build up a durable poetical opus, although the work of most of these writers was to suffer from the effects of the multidisciplinarity that had shaped the production of the previous neo-realist generation:

Maria Teresa Horta sauntered away into romantic fiction, with repeated erotic digressions in an intimist vein. Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão divided herself between poetry and drama — the critics saw in her obsession for the metaphor, a cause of asphyxia and wasting of the text, the sign of an historically determined valorisation of mythic patterns; eventually she veered — after questioning the presence in her poetry of intertextual subject and autonomy of writing — towards ways of stressing the sound charge of her poetry, in compositions that had camonean resonances. Casimiro de Brito cultivated romantic fiction, chronicle and criticism, moving in poetry to superlative plateaus of intelligence of pleasure, bringing up the provocation of desire to the surface of the solar words that name it, once he had got over the elegiac pessimism of his early verses. In his latest work, nostalgia, androgyny, and narcissistic affirmation of the urgency to love as a way out to the "beautiful restless chaos of the world around", blend into a valorisation of the present and its privileged moments.

Luiza Neto Jorge (1939-1989), died when she still had much to give to poetry, and her literary heritage is limited to those verses, of intransigent and bruised straightforwardness — not exempt from exacting formalist containment — through which she attacks the universe of ready-made ideas, exalts the metamorphoses of the body mined by illness or dominated by erotic desire and struggle for human dignity. Gastão Cruz is probably the poet who most conforms to the initial objectives of the group, if only because, having been one of its theoreticians, he possesses the capacity for expression that incorporates many of the objectives he pursued.

With the publication of the first poems of José Carlos de Vasconcelos, Fernando Assis Pacheco e Manuel Alegre, the poets agglutinated around project Poesia 61 found their replica in Coimbra, still living under the tutelary aegis of Vértice and of the ideological incentive of Joaquim Namorado. These three influent figures of their generation eventually followed different paths. José Carlos de Vasconcelos was to trade the sweaty toil of poetry for the seductions of journalism, keeping up, after sixteen years of obstinacy, the Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias — a reference title in the Portuguese cultural press. Fernando Assis Pacheco (1937-1996) whom we already mentioned in respect to the colonial war, was to move on towards a poetry of surreal-satiric outline, far away from the beautiful purposes of his neo-realist phase; and Manuel Alegre, distributing his vast opus between condemnation of war, civic protest and an affectionate dive into the lyrical heritage of Portugal (from Camões to Bernardim Ribeiro, from the troubadours to Fernando Pessoa), keeping his country as the central mythical instance, processes sometimes with epical fervour, sometimes with a delicate sensibility, historic facts erected into nuclear themes without ever dispensing from the rhythmic resources and musicality of the best traditional poetry.

Organized around the literary pages of the provincial press, several poets of diverse origin (for the most part, neo-realists and the like, but also surrealists, like Carlos Loures and Fernando Grade) set up yearly meetings, which really only occurred when it was possible, with the motivation of getting to know each other and to annoy the dictatorship, which, up to a point, they achieved. António Augusto Menano, a poet from Figueira da Foz, and Santos Simões, a teacher in Guimarães, succeeding in carrying out these meetings, fraught with difficulties, since it was in the aftermath of one of them (Cascais, 1964) although not in direct consequence of it, that the political police arrested poet Carlos Loures (O Cárcere e o Prado Luminoso, anthology, Salamandra, 1990). José Ferraz Diogo, Daniel Filipe, Idalécio Cação, Manuel Amaral e António Augusto Sales among others, were also members of that movement. With the exception of Fernando Grade, who did not leave poetry, the remaining figures either disappeared in the vortex of political activism, or lost themselves in professions more stimulating, or, in the end, yielded like so many others to the attractions of prose. António Augusto Menano, has been lately noted for historical novels based on his experience in Macau, where he lived for a few years (he also wrote a few poems there). Carlos Loures chooses rather to fictionalise episodes of the struggle against salazarism. Luís de Miranda Rocha — a contemporary of that group, who comes walking his own path of existential investigation with semantically complex texts, still demonstrates his coherence in relation to his chosen field.

In 1964 the first volume of anthological publication Poesia Experimental appeared. It rallied names revealed during the last quarter of the former decade, in view to open a front of "deconstruction of speech" that ideologically supported a traumatized society, contaminated with internal and external contradictions… a provincial society oppressed and closed like ours. Experimental poetry, geared to explore resources not specifically literary, as the visual and the objectual, was set on a frontal collision course, with the values that supported the most influent literary criticism of the time, journalistic criticism, as it favoured "values more pragmatic, objective and constructivist, as the structure of text construction, be it visually or phonetically or morphologically, or the transgression productive of its own textual autonomy, or the conceptual-visual isomorphism in the concrete poem." António Aragão, António Ramos Rosa, António Barahona, E.M. de Melo e Castro, Herberto Helder and Salette Tavares figured on the launching pad of Poesia Experimental. Most of these poets were to follow their own interests, that did not always coincide with the founding nature of the movement. E.M. de Melo e Castro, the main theoretician and divulger of the actions of their group, Ana Hatherly, Salette Tavares (1922-1995) and José Alberto Marques, who, were later joined by an iconoclastic poet like Alberto Pimenta, identified with Adorno's positions, are the most attractive figures in avant-garde poetry as it was practised and vulgarized in its fundamentals and purposes, in the sixties, and as in the former decades it had found in Brasil forerunners of the span of Décio Pigmatari and Haroldo and Augusto de Campos.

Writers from the decade of the 60's (either well established at that time, or just beginning their career) have had broad repercussions since April 25 and up to our days. As to individual performance, however, the period is dominated by two poets from different origins: Herberto Helder, who had made his debut in the previous decade (O Amor em Visita, 1958) as a fellow-crusader of the mentors of Poesia Experimental, flaunts from the start his frontal refusal of the dominant cultural layout, and Ruy Belo (1933-1978) — whose maiden book, Aquele Grande Rio Eufrates, came out in 1961 — originating in the spiritualist area close to the Catholic Church, "forces" his poetry into a sliding movement, against the preoccupations of secular society, ending with conveying pungent contradictions of ontological features, which for many constitute his main wealth, through the neo-romantic attitude that proceeded to imbue his writing, until then adressing major historic events and the eulogy of the country as a tutelary mythic universe:

I will not go back a past that is known by many, knowledge of which is available to any one. In spite of this, I have suffered some, in a society and in a country where there is much suffering. At the end of ten years of a mystical adventure that ended ten years ago, I came out into the street, and into the day-to-day life, with this handful of poems, with these words that they let me write in the short intervals of a silence for many years imposed, under the pretext that, breaking it would jeopardize my soul, as if I had some thing for a soul, as if being in jeopardy was not, perhaps, my deepest reason for living.

There is premonition in those verses from 1976, extracted from the poem Uma Forma de me Despedir:

Concerning Herberto Helder, Fernando J.B. Martinho was to say that we are dealing with "a poet indelibly marked with Surrealism" who used elements like "excess", "furious grace", "vertigo" and "fever" as the fundaments of his creative process while Maria Estela Guedes, in an extensive and well-informed work of interpretation of that author's production, from the very beginning demolishes the concerns of the most sceptical reader: "Herberto Helder is one of the most fascinating poets to have been given me to read, and the one whose spell-binding power most dazzled me. This book represents the toll that at the end of the road one must pay for travelling it, it is also the result of four years of assiduous study of the works of Herbert."

Ruy Belo and Herberto Helder, not in a deliberate way but simply because they are intrinsically hostile to the economy of language that made up the proposition of Poesia 61, counter all and any obstacle to the flowing of the word, not acknowledging technical limits to its expansion, and if the first one, however, still respects the presuppositions of classic communication, the second one subverts them in dazzling play of splintered mirrors, in an exuberant revindication of freedom for the poetic text, contrasting in some way with the reserve that regulates his own social behaviour. Herberto does not accept prizes, does not give interviews, systematically refuses tributes and prebends, he has no media visibility, living exclusively for Poetry, surrendering himself to self and Poetry itself, without intermediaries but the publishers of his books, his readers, and a few friends. A most peculiar character in the world of small vanities and petty stardoms of the artists of Letters, Herberto Helder stands out, without doubt, as one of the strongest literary personalities of this century, and one about which much ink still has to flow; besides that he has not yet tired out his enviable taste for experimenting nor exhausted his fabulous linguistic arsenal, the finished works of the illustrious poet from Madeira — what he uses to call "Poesia Toda" — is enough already to feed the interest of several generations of scholarly brows that will peer over it.

Another significant poet was Armando Silva Carvalho, who made his debut in 1965 with Lírica Consumível. A multi-faceted writer, who, as well in poetry as in prose has made clear an appreciable chest/framework satítiro in the critic to the society of his time, now censoring the dialectics of consumption and advertising rites, now refining the emphatization of eroticism, all of which in the perspective of the wearing out of a vision of the urban social potentially generating civilization discomfort, Armando Silva Carvalho is one of the good values of his generations, and recently received, ex-aequo with Egito Conçalves, the Pen Club Prize for his book Canis Dei, 1995.

Vasco Graça Moura, who began in 1963 with Modo Mudando, followed by Semana Inglesa (1965) and Quatro Sextinas (1973) in author's editions, came to gain great public notoriety only after April 25, either by the rhythm of production and publication given to his work since then, or because he has engaged in multiple activities, with warranted affirmation in the media, particularly those relating with his citizen's posture of intellectual reserve for cavaquismo (1). Although he did experiment with romantic fiction, it is in poetry — a poetry initially close to surrealism that later drifted towards a classicizing stylisation of his discourse, sustained, on one side, by the vast culture of VGM, on another, by his call to the eternal themes (love, death, time) worked over with torrential passion, aesthetic exigency and humour. He is a multifaceted writer; of the twenty two titles that he has published in poetry, one must add thirteen books of essays, three novels two plays, chronicle, diary, and an anthology. In 1996 came out his Poemas Escolhidos (1963-1995), Bertrand; a good platform for anyone who wishes to launch a study of the work and an interpretative study of the author.

Liberto Cruz beyond his above-referred intervention as a witness to the colonial war, has a diversified work that includes, even, a passage through experimental poetry, (under the pseudonym of Álvaro Neto) and he would have given the movement a parodic dimension that he "did not exploit/explore enough". From his baroquizing beginning, followed by the experimentalist phase — with many works of essayistic character in the middle — Liberto Cruz arrives at Caderno de Encargos, Colibri, 1994, where he himself defines himself as homo viator.

Eduardo Guerra Carneiro is rather a poet of surrealistic extraction, following a syncopated course, reaching its zenith in the sixties. His production took on a slower pace in the decade of the eighties — a rhythm that continued identically during the nineties.

From identical roots comes José Viale Moutinho, a poet from Madeira rooted in Oporto, the author of a handful of books of verse of high quality.

Fernando Alvarenga, a poet who began in 1966, produced books in which verses with African overtones indicate the passage of the poet into Angola, is a personality with a steering presence in literary essay-writing, who succeeds in harmonizing what for many is irreconcilable: being a Pessoan of recognized value (A Socialização da Arte em Fernando Pessoa, 1984) he is an equally scrupulous scholar of neo-realism (Afluentes Teórico-Estéticos do Neo-Realismo Visual Português, 1989).

Orlando Neves, whose maiden book was published in 1959 (Sopapo para a Destruição da Felicidade) is one of the prolific authors of his time, with a wide range of intervention in the fields of chronicle, of children's books and youth literature, of theatre and romantic fiction, outside the lyric. The latter has been collected in the Poesia volume, Sol XXI (1995), in which figure fourteen of his twenty two titles of poetry, and J.O. Travanca-Rego, himself a poet and an attentive analyst of O.N.'s poetics, refers to him in those terms, in an essay of wide approximation: "Through concitation of multiple, diverse and contradictory existential latencies through ransacking an archive of experiences, memories, intentions, the ego refines here also his tense unity in a contained repercussion of 'all': the ego, the others, History, presence and absence of the living time, … re-presented, desired, irrecoverable, unstoppable."

Mendes de Carvalho (1927-1988), writes in the line of O'Neill, but his satiric vein is more biting, less polite. Others, whose names were important in the sixties, are still active: Arnaldo Saraiva, José Augusto Seabra, Yvette Centeno, A.M. Pires Cabral, Dórdio Guimarães, M.S. Lourenço and Maria Amélia Neto.